Social representations of animal diseases: anthropologicalapproaches to pathogens crossing species barriers

Frédéric Keck1,*, Nicolas Lain�e2, Arnaud Morvan1, and Sandrine Ruhlmann3

1 UMR 7130 – LAS – CNRS/EHESS/Collège de France, 52 rue Cardinal Lemoine, 75005 Paris, France2 UMR 208 – IRD/MNHN – “Patrimoines Locaux Environnement et Globalisation”, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, DépartementHomme et Environnement, 57 rue Cuvier, CP 51, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France

3 CNRS/EHESS, UMR 8173, 54 boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France

Received 7 May 2020, Accepted 14 March 2021, Published online 9 April 2021

Abstract – Debates about emerging infectious diseases often oppose natural conceptions of zoonotic reservoirs withcultural practices bringing humans into contact with animals. This article compares the representations of cross-speciespathogens at ontological levels below the opposition between nature and culture. It describes the perceptions of dis-tinctions between interiority and physicality, between wild and domestic, and between sick and dead in three differentcontexts where human societies manage animal diseases: Australia, Laos and Mongolia. Our article also argues thatzoonotic pathogens are one of the entities mobilized by local knowledge to attenuate troubles in ordinary relations withanimals, and shows that the conservation of cultural heritage is a tool of mitigation for infectious diseases emerging inanimal reservoirs.

Key words: Zoonoses, Biosecurity, Local knowledge, Cultural heritage, Mongolia, Laos, Australia.

Resume – Représentations sociales des maladies animales : approches anthropologiques des pathogènesfranchissant les barrières d’espèces. Les discussions sur les maladies infectieuses émergentes opposent souventles conceptions naturelles des réservoirs de zoonoses et les pratiques culturelles qui rapprochent les humains desanimaux. Cet article compare les représentations des pathogènes qui franchissent les barrières d’espèces à desniveaux ontologiques sous-jacents à l’opposition entre nature et culture. Il décrit les perceptions des distinctionsentre intériorité et extériorité, entre sauvage et domestique, entre maladie et mort dans trois contextes où lessociétés humaines gèrent des maladies animales : l’Australie, le Laos et la Mongolie. Il montre également que lespathogènes zoonotiques apparaissent au milieu d’autres entités pour atténuer des troubles dans leurs relationsordinaires avec les animaux, et souligne que la conservation du patrimoine culturel peut être un outil de contrôledes maladies infectieuses qui émergent dans les réservoirs animaux.

Introduction

It is estimated that 70% of new pathogens in humans arezoonotic, i.e., transmitted from animals to humans [8, 22].The current COVID-19 pandemic, probably caused by a coro-navirus endemic in bats, shows the high cost of public healthmeasures for emerging pathogens and the need for their earlydetection in animal reservoirs [61, 62]. A “One Healthapproach” connects the surveillance of diseases in humans, ani-mals, and their environment to understand how infectious dis-eases emerge and are transmitted from one species to the

other, as well as within each species. However, the One Healthapproach has suffered from a colonial view of animals and theirenvironments as resources to valorize, and failed to take intoaccount non-Western views of animal agency [29]. Parasitolo-gists, epidemiologists and ecologists have turned toward socialanthropologists to understand the social and cultural factorsallowing pathogens to cross the barriers between species andinvolve local populations in the management of animal diseasesbefore they spread to humans [15].

The social anthropology of zoonoses has worked with thehistory of medical sciences to understand how concepts of

*Corresponding author: keck.fred@gmail.com

Special Issue – One Health: A social science discussion of a global agendaInvited Editors: Jean Estebanez & Pascal Boireau

Parasite 28, 35 (2021)� F. Keck et al., published by EDP Sciences, 2021https://doi.org/10.1051/parasite/2021032

Available online at:www.parasite-journal.org

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0),which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

OPEN ACCESSRESEARCH ARTICLE

emergence and spillover have changed the views of enzooticco-evolutions between humans, animals and parasites [33].Hotspots of zoonotic emergence have become sites of investi-gation on the multiple relations between humans and animals[5]. Concepts of proximity and contact, often used in OneHealth representations of zoonotic transmission, have beenproblematized using materials from narratives on broader mul-ti-species ecologies and histories [1, 41]. The urgency of biose-curity interventions, focusing on early detection using sentineldevices, is often contrasted with cultural practices which needto be regulated, such as bushmeat hunting or wildlife markets[23, 30]. However, social anthropology cannot oppose a globalview of nature as self-regulating with its cultural localizationsproducing risks of emergence. The opposition between tradi-tional societies fearing dangers and modern societies calculatingrisks appears less relevant in a world where common uncertain-ties require a plurality of cognitive operations [11, 21, 32].

As the term “culture” is not adequate to study the percep-tion of zoonotic risks, it is more fruitful to focus on representa-tions of species barriers. In all societies, humans makeinferences about the behaviors of animals based on their simi-larities and differences. A zoonotic disease is an opportunityto question what humans and animals have in common basedon shared representations, which stabilize the potential crisisopened by the disease. The term “ontology” has been used inthe debate within anthropology and science studies to overcomethe opposition between nature and culture, since it takes seri-ously the statements about what “is” and what “is not” in a col-lective form of life, particularly in the perception of invisibleentities such as spirits, ghosts or microbes [19, 60]. However,the term “representation” is more open to investigation onhow these statements are stabilized over time, inscribed inmodes of production and valorized by institutions. Species bar-riers are problematic sites not only for disease management butalso for ethical reflexivity and social justice: they raise the ques-tion “What made me sick?” in a web of vulnerable entangle-ments between humans and non-humans. While the conceptof cultural behavior focuses on human-animal proximity asan obstacle to the global management of zoonoses, the conceptof social representation helps to include societies living withanimals in global health [13]. When domestic and/or wild ani-mals are killed to prevent the spread of their diseases to otheranimals or to humans, this causes ontological and ethicalproblems because humans consider animals not only as com-modities that can be destroyed in a food chain but also, in somecases, as companions within kinship relations of attention andcare [16, 17]. A sick animal – domestic, wild, or pet – is anambivalent being for humans who have to protect it againstthe disease but also protect themselves from the disease; hencethe need to compare different ways to mitigate this existentialtension through collective representations.

Method

Philippe Descola [11] has argued that four ontologies areavailable for the human mind to compare human andnon-human beings based on the polarities of inference aboutagentivity: naturalism (different interiority, same physicality),

animism (same interiority, different physicality), analogism(different interiority, different physicality), totemism (same inte-riority, same physicality). For Descola, while animism is moredeveloped in Amazonia and Siberia, analogism in Africa, cen-tral America and Asia, and totemism in Australia, they can alsocoexist in the same situation, depending on the relationsbetween humans and animals at stake (hunting, breeding, labor,etc).

We took this hypothesis as a starting point for empiricalcomparison. We did not seek to illustrate Descola’s ontologiesin our fieldwork, but we took them as a stimulating hypothesisto raise questions on the social representations of species barri-ers. Rather than start from global health measures to search howthey can be applied in different locations, which supposes anopposition between interventions on nature and culturalobstacles [9], we have started with animal diseases that crossspecies barriers differently in various ontologies: totemism onAustralia, analogism in Laos, and animism in Mongolia. Wekept in mind that these ontologies coexist with other ontologiesin each of these three societies and found results that confirmthese hybridizations.

Frédéric Keck has supervised the collective construction ofa questionnaire on pathogens crossing species barriers, based onhis own research in south China [24]. Three anthropologistsused this questionnaire in societies they had studied beforethrough other topics of research. Arnaud Morvan studiedAustralian indigenous art in relation to colonial history, rela-tionship to the land, totemic places, and species. Nicolas Lainéstudies human–animal labor and local knowledge on elephantsincluding domestication and ethnoveterinary practices in post-colonial Laos and India. Sandrine Ruhlmann studies techniquesand material culture mobilized by food practices in post-com-munist Mongolia.

First results have been surprising because some of thequestions took different meanings in the social contexts whereanthropologists asked them and were often confused withveterinarian experts. From a quantitative point of view, thequestion “Can diseases be transmitted from animals tohumans?” received a positive answer among 60% of the peoplewe interviewed in Australia, 0% in Laos, and 85% in Mongolia.When we asked our informants about their understanding ofbacteria or viruses, we often had very vague answers, or simplerepetitions of public health campaigns. However, we used onto-logical questions as ways to describe ethnographically theparameters of social representations of species barriers, andadapted them to local conditions. Rather than ask if our infor-mants knew about a zoonosis, we asked them how they repre-sented microbes and how microbes crossed species barrierscausing pathologies among animals and humans. While theknowledge of microbes as “natural” entities was very unstable,our interviews aimed at tracing the map of entities that weremobilized to cope with a potential disease spreading throughanimals. The three researchers thus combined the qualitativequestionnaire method, open-ended discussion, and participantobservation by taking part in rituals involving animals, animallabor or herding practices.

In Australia, Arnaud Morvan investigated Aboriginal repre-sentations of flying foxes (Pteropus spp.) as natural hosts of theHendra Virus (HeV) on the tropical coast of North Queensland.

2 F. Keck et al.: Parasite 2021, 28, 35

Since 1994, this virus from the Paramyxoviridae family haskilled 89 horses and 4 humans in Australia, spreading from fly-ing foxes to horses and from horses to humans. HeV has beenfound in the four species of Australian Pteropus: Pteropusalecto, P. scapulatus, P. conspicillatus, and P. poliocephalus[51, 57]. Biosecurity interventions have aimed at controllingthe virus in the animal reservoir, particularly by separatinghorses and flying foxes. Despite their long-term relations withflying foxes, indigenous groups have rarely been involved inthe management of the bat populations, either in bat sheltersor in natural parks. While Aboriginal people have used flyingfoxes as bush meat for centuries without noticeable humantransmission of HeV, and prepared them as a traditional medi-cine to treat respiratory diseases, the subject has never beeninvestigated and public health experts have ignored or discour-aged these medicinal practices and associated knowledge.

In Laos, Nicolas Lainé studied the representations of tuber-culosis (TB) by elephant owners and mahouts (elephant han-dlers). During the past 20 years, the growing number ofcaptive elephants tested positive for TB in various institutionsworldwide (in western zoos or in some tourist camps in Asianelephant range countries) has caused public health concerns,mainly related to the significant risk of propagation. Globally,TB remains the second leading cause of human death afterHIV, generating nearly 1.5 million deaths annually. In this con-text, the concern with elephant TB has led to unprecedentednumbers of seroprevalence and epidemiological studies to helpprevent and treat the animals [35]. Southeast Asia hosts morethan 15 000 elephants in captivity and has the highest preva-lence of tuberculosis in the world. A survey made in Laos[31] indicated a prevalence of 34% among elephants tested,the highest rate for TB in elephants in Asia so far. Since TBis a slow endemic disease, and is not necessarily the primarycause of death for infected patients, there has been no publichealth crisis after this warning. However, because TB inelephants is considered a reverse zoonosis transmitted fromhumans to animals, surveillance aims at protecting humansand animals [26].

In Mongolia, a post-communist country with 70.9 millionhead of domestic animals (sheep, goats, cattle, horses, andcamels), and 3.2 million inhabitants, and where one third ofeconomic production comes from herding, Sandrine Ruhlmannconducted ethnographic research in three provinces (Töv,Hentij, and Gov’sümber) during the winters and summers of2014–2019. In these areas, families practice extensive,polyspecific, and nomadic herding, according to predefinedroutes across seasonal rotating pastures to preserve soil andwater resources. Sandrine Ruhlmann has focused on the man-agement and surveillance of three animal diseases that werecontrolled under the Communist government, but that havesince chronically re-emerged, developed, and spread in differentways over the vast Mongolian territory: brucellosis (a bacterialdisease – Brucella melitensis –, endemic and widespread, zoo-notic), anthrax (a bacterial disease – Bacillus anthracis –, local-ized, zoonotic), and foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) (a viraldisease – Picornaviridae aphthovirus –, localized and pandemic,non-zoonotic) [48, 49]. The prevalence of brucellosis is highthroughout the entire territory, among human and domestic

animal populations (mainly ruminants), with disparitiesbetween the 21 provinces, depending on whether NGOs haveimplemented a vaccination program for several years. Animportant part of the rural population (sometimes up to 11%)is infected, especially animal workers [2]. However, inter-viewed herders do not fear the “bacterium” (bakteri) as theyknow that “brucellosis” (brucellëz) is transmitted through con-tact with milked milk, consumption of dairy products andundercooked animal flesh, saliva, and blood at the time of deliv-ery, but are not aware of the correlation between brucellosis andabortion in animal and human populations. By contrast, theyare afraid of “anthrax” (boom), because they know that the“bacterium” (bakteri) is highly contagious, transmitted by hair,wool, hides, bone, air, meat, and contact, and is fatal for ani-mals and humans, and can be widespread over the whole terri-tory, excluding southern desert provinces. Finally, “foot-and-mouth disease” (šülhij or šülhij övčin) is the most familiar dis-ease because it is “highly visible” in the media and “highly con-tagious among animals” (air, contact with bodily excretionssuch as feces, urine, milk and saliva from affected animals),and has chronically emerged among domestic and wild bovine,ovine, and caprine animals, which are in contact during sea-sonal migrations, in the four eastern provinces. Herders donot fear this “virus” (virus) in the sense that it kills only ani-mals, domestic and wild, but they fear that their herd may beinfected and that, according to international and national regu-lations, they must slaughter all or part of their herd, their onlyresource and source of income [12, 46].

To analyze the representations of zoonoses, we supposedthat indigenous populations in Australia, Laos, and Mongoliaengage different polarities of human experience in contrast-ing ways. We built the interviews around the followingpolarities:

– Interior/exterior: Do pathogens come from inside or out-side the animals’ body? What are the conceptions of trans-mission by contact? What are the proper relations ofproximity and distance between humans and animals?

– Wild/domestic: How does domestication change the man-agement of animal diseases? Are wild animals treated sep-arately from domestic animals? How is the separationbetween wild and domestic traced in relation to the habitat?

– Sick/dead, versus culled/slaughtered: How are sick animalstreated in comparison with dead animals? Are sick animalseaten, buried or burnt? What is the difference between ani-mals that died from zoonoses and animals that died fromother diseases?

Results

a) Interiority/externality

The notion of interiority describes, in various societies,ideas of souls, breath, energy, and forces that animate the bodyand leave it at death. Physicality describes substances such asblood, flesh and bones that compose the body and are frag-mented at death. The treatment of disease involves knowledge

F. Keck et al.: Parasite 2021, 28, 35 3

on interiorities and physicalities shared (or not) betweenhumans and animals.

Australia

In Far North Queensland, flying foxes (kambi) are consid-ered bush meat (minja kambi), traditional medicine, and totemicreferents [36, 45]. Today, pathogens such as the Hendra virusare sometimes associated with flying foxes, but this does notprevent people from consuming them, either cooked in aground oven or in soup. Most people are aware of the potentialpresence of the virus and special attention is taken during thecooking process to “kill the germs”. While this practice of longand slow cooking is considered traditional, it coincides withnon-indigenous public health messages about pathogentransmission, imported into local discourse. Early ethnographerWalter Roth [47] mentioned the alimentary use of bats amongstthe North Queensland indigenous people at the end of the 19thcentury, but no medicinal practices have ever been documented.Soup made from flying fox is also considered traditional med-icine to treat certain types of respiratory problems, less severebut analogous to the respiratory syndromes caused by the Hen-dra virus. It remains to be seen how this practice is connected tohypotheses on immune properties in bat organisms that makethem healthy carriers of pathogens [57].

However, for indigenous people, pathogens do not onlycome from inside the animal but rather from outside as theyare connected with totemic sites and associated species. In Aus-tralia, totems are prototypal hybrid beings that embody indige-nous concepts of interspecies connections, materialized inspecific classes of humans and non-humans sharing a commonmythical ancestry and common attributes. They are oftenattached to a specific animal species but not exclusively; theycan also refer to plants, minerals, elements, psychological traits,or sometimes diseases [14, 56]. People are usually associatedwith several totems (individual conception totems, clan totems,sexual totems, kinship totem), and inherit certain rights andresponsibilities toward a multiplicity of animal species (or ele-ment, plants, minerals, etc.) and their associated place in thelandscape, often considered sacred [39, 40]. A person cannoteat his/her own totem. As a Yalanji elder explains:

“[this person] would get sick. He wouldn’t die but hewould get sick, sore guts, stomach pain you know. Thenyou know it’s wrong” (Interview, 2015).Cases of disease totems are rare but highly significant,

especially in their relation to animal species. Early ethnogra-phers Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen [52] recorded anArrernte (central desert language group) totemic story linkingan animal species, a place and an infection related to a narra-tive and sickness called erkincha, a disfiguring disease

(Treponema bacteria) associated with syphilis. Part of the erk-incha mythical story is concerned with Alchipa, a totemicbeing, related to a small desert marsupial (western quoll,Dasyurus geoffroii), that carried the disease erkincha and dis-appeared after creating several landmarks. Since then, theAlchipa has been associated with a rock called “Apertaatnumbria,” a specific site that causes diseased growth (earlystage of syphilis). Spencer and Gillen also observed a restric-tion towards eating the marsupial species (Dasyurus geoffroii)called after their Alchipa ancestor, to prevent the disease. Theexistence of food restrictions applied to animal species carry-ing a disease clearly confirms the existence of specific localknowledge about disease transmission between animals andhumans [58].

Considering diseases in relation to the connection of ananimal species (Dasyurus geoffroii) a “place” (“Apertaatnumbria” rock) means that pathogens are not fully indepen-dent agents but rather a web of interspecies and ecologicalrelations. In the Australian indigenous conception, the sharedtotemic origin of people and animals theoretically allows vitalenergies as well as pathogenic agents to circulate betweenhuman and non-human species. The pharmaceutical valueof bats remains to be thoroughly researched but their medic-inal use has been observed in the entire Asia–Pacific regionand beyond [44]. The totemic conception reverses the imageof flying foxes from a potentially pathogenic to a potentiallytherapeutic species.

Laos

Tuberculosis has revealed the conceptions of interiority andexteriority engaged in elephant labor and care. Laos is knownas “the country of one million elephants” (Lan Xang), notablybecause elephants have been raised by kings for transportationand by colonial powers for the logging industry, and now byenvironmental associations who organize ecological tours. Overthese different periods, mahouts have developed knowledge towork with elephants and to care for their health using localplants. But for them, the presence of external signs on elephantbodies (such as runny nose) does not appear relevant. Accord-ing to some mahouts, after 4 or 5 days working in the forest, theelephant’s back becomes emaciated, and some even changetheir skin colour in the forest. However, all mahouts say thatonce their task is completed, and when they let their elephantswander freely in the forest, it only takes a few days to recovertheir ideal weight.

By contrast, the perception of internal signs of health isexpressed in the language of spirits. Like all big animals, ele-phants are believed to be inhabited by phi (spirits), and likehumans they are animated by a vital force, the kwaan. Everynight when mahouts leave their elephant in the forest after aday’s work, they invoke the spirit of the forest (phi pa) and

Animal Diseases Hendra Virus Tuberculosis Brucellosis, anthrax, Foot-and-mouth diseaseAnimal Species Bats Elephants Sheep, goats, cattle, horses, camels (domestic);

and gazelles (wild)Locations Australia (Queensland) Laos MongoliaPredominant ontology Totemism Analogism AnimismFieldworker and specialities Arnaud Morvan

(art, totems and rituals)Nicolas Lainé (animal

labor, local knowledge)Sandrine Ruhlmann

(food practices and techniques)

4 F. Keck et al.: Parasite 2021, 28, 35

the spirit of soil and earth of a specific territory (chao chao giftdee), and ask them to protect the elephant in case of attack byother animals – like snakes – but also by evil spirits (phi phai).

This ritualization requires the intervention of a specialist.The mo xang firstly intervenes during the training of the animal,and then when an elephant becomes weak and does not respondto his mahout, or in case of attack by a bad spirit. Throughincantation and magical words (khata), he can cure the elephantand chase away bad spirits. Moreover, every year, the shamanperforms the annual baci ceremony offered to village elephants.This ritual aims at gathering all the vital forces (kwaan) withinelephants’ bodies, in a form of rejuvenation, but it is alsooffered occasionally to thank the animals for the work theycarry out for humans.

In villages, another specialist intervenes to ensure the well-being and health of elephants using medicinal plants to curehumans as well as animals: the mo ya. Their manuscripts ofplant compositions do not mention respiratory disease liketuberculosis. Even though humans, elephants and other domes-tic animals such as buffaloes are vulnerable to spirits (phi),considering tuberculosis (wan nga lok) a general disease (pa-nyaat) crossing the interspecies barrier is hardly thinkable.

Mongolia

Livestock health is highly meaningful for interviewednomadic herders. It represents what a household possesses: a“healthy and prosperous herd is an indicator of happiness”,meaning that “everything has been done in a good way”. Toprevent misfortune, people are expected to act properly ineveryday life or at specific events where the fate of the soulis at stake, i.e. the rebirth of the deceased’s soul or the fixationof the new-born child’s soul in his/her skeleton. A sick animal,as much as a sick human, means that “something has been donein the wrong manner that makes the master spirits of nature orBuddhist divinities angry, or that attracts wandering souls ofthe dead”. Households have “something to repair”, “happinessto (re)call”, by themselves and/or by bringing a monk, ashaman, and a veterinarian, one after the other, without anyhierarchy or distinction. The consultation of a ritual specialistleads Mongolian herders to list a set of spiritual entities onwhich their happiness and health depends: nature spirits-mas-ters, Buddhist divinities, souls of the dead to be reborn, andsouls of the dead condemned to wander.

Humans and animals are considered similar as far as theirbodies are made of flesh and bone, but different with regardto other components: if both have a “vital force” (süld), a kindof energy that irrigates organs and sustains life, and a “breath oflife” (am’), that outlives skeleton at death, only humans have a“soul” (süns), a unit of life residing in their skeleton and ani-mating their body. Meritorious actions practiced during lifeallow their “soul” (süns) “to be reborn” in the body of anotherhuman. Herders cannot conceive the rebirth of a human soul inthe body of an animal (as in the Buddhist doctrine) becausesuch a conception would mean a breach within unity and per-petuation of the human species [50].

In addition to more recently imposed western medicine, thereare at least two medicines coexisting among Mongolian people:popular medicine closely related to shamanic healing practices(dom), and high medicine derived from the Tibetan tradition.

These healing practices can act on different diseases, such asanthrax, rabies, FMD, and scabies [20]. Physical treatments(em) are not restricted to diseases, and magical-religious therapies(dom) to misfortunes. Both types of treatments involve the sametechnical gestures: press, wrap, wash (with a damp cloth), pierce(with a large needle), incise (with the knife blade), scrub, cauterize(with a mud or tea poultice, with something hot), burn, fumigate(with incense), sprinkle (libation ofmilk), swallow (a curative sub-stance, salt, meat soup, sulphur powder, extract of willow bark ortobacco, blood of horse or gazelle, raw milk), scare (wanderingsouls of dead), and offer food to divinities. These actions simulta-neously aim to remove angry spirits of nature or wandering soulsof the dead and cure the disease [6, 20, 49].

This dual conception of the human being – body and soul –has implications in the representation of the emergence andtransmission of pathogens. Most herders know they shouldnot enter into contact with substances of animals sick with bru-cellosis or anthrax: saliva, urine, excrements, fetal water, blood,raw flesh and milk, etc. However, most of the time, local know-how involves manipulating these substances, such as pus out ofthe internal (organs, flesh), or external body parts (skin, hair,nails). The verb garah, “come out”, qualifies a disease outbreakor emergence: it comes from the soil, it is transported by theEarth or air, and at the same time it comes from infected ani-mals (internal and/or external part of their body) and from theanger of different spiritual entities. Some pathogens resideunder the skin or inside the body (i.e. brucellosis, intestinalanthrax) and most of their symptoms are “invisible”, whileother pathogens are external, “visible”, located on the skin(cutaneous anthrax, FMD), and on the eyes, nails, or mouth(FMD), etc. Surveillance consists in “continuous attention toanimals’ behaviour”, meaning in particular “their appetite,sleep, and movement, if they urinate and defecate normally”,and if “they isolate themselves from the rest of the herd”, “theyrefuse to go to pasture at dawn”, “they stay and lie down, goaround in circles, or tremble”, etc. Daily herding activities –

carried out inside the camp – allow herders to detect somethingwrong because they are moments of proximity.

Zoonotic pathogens thus mobilize totemic conceptions ofshared properties in ancestral places in Australia, notions offorces and spirits in Laos, and manipulation of substances inMongolia. These contrast with the naturalistic oppositionbetween animal bodies and human knowledge at the basis ofpharmaceutical techniques.

b) Wild/domestic

“Wild” usually defines spaces untouched by human inter-ventions where pathogens silently mutate, and “domestic”spaces of cohabitation with humans where pathogens are ampli-fied. Our investigations have blurred these oppositions.

Laos

Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) is a specific or limit caseof domestication. Like other Tai-speaking populations acrossSouth and Southeast Asia, in Laos the Tai-Lue and Tai-Laomark a strong difference between the world of the forest (pa)and the world of the village (ban). This differentiation is usedto distinguish forest or wild elephants (xang pa) from village

F. Keck et al.: Parasite 2021, 28, 35 5

or domestic ones (xang ban). Historically in Asia, the renewalof village elephant herds involved forest captures and resultedin a specific form of domestication [27]. In Laos, capturesand socialization involved elephant specialists (mo xang) whoremoved forest spirits from the elephant’s body and calleddomestic spirits to take care of the elephant’s health. Thisshows that the construction of a so-called “domestic” animalrelies on the transformation of a “wild” one.

In villages, contrary to buffaloes or other livestock, ele-phants are believed to be part of the family. In most of the ele-phant owner households, photos of elephants are displayedalong with all family members. Elephants are also protectedby the spirit of the house (phi huen), which is not the casefor buffaloes. For example, a mahout in Viengkeo villages saidthat for several days, he was not able to find his elephant in theforest, and finally managed to get the elephant back. He saidthat the spirit of the house had hidden the animal, deprivingthe family of incomes, because the wife and husband werearguing all the time. Finally, after promising the spirit that theywill not argue anymore, he was able to find the elephant.

The recent emergence of elephant TB is probably the resultof transmission from humans or cattle and not from interactionswith wild congeners. Nevertheless, since village elephants arestill in contact with their forest congeners, there is a risk oftransmission of TB throughout the forest, including wild ele-phants and other species. But this risk does not appear to be rel-evant for the mahouts and elephants owners.

Australia

According to epidemiologic research, the Hendra virus isendemic in Australia among flying foxes, and was recentlyintroduced in horses, and then jumped from horses to humans.Flying foxes live in forests, swamps, and coastal areas and havenever been domesticated (despite some bat shelters built fortemporary rescue by conservationists). Yet numerous coloniescan be found in urban areas, including parks, gardens, or evenisolated trees in city centres [55]. Most recent studies tend toshow that there are more colonies in or around cities than inremote areas. City edges seem to be the main contact zonebetween bat and human activity, including horse grazing nearthe forest. For most non-indigenous Australians living near fly-ing fox colonies, these animals represent an considerable sourceof public nuisance. People interviewed in the Cairns regionsspeak about the noise, smell, crop damage, and more recently,the Hendra virus. The words “flying rats” or “plague” come upduring informal conversations.

Paradoxically, Hendra virus also brought to collective atten-tion the fragility of some flying fox species (Pteropus conspicil-latus) and led to protection policies. Bat shelters are placeswhere it is possible to treat, cure, protect and in some casesdomesticate flying foxes (once healed, animals unable to bereintroduced into the wild are kept in the refuge and givennames). Ultimately, both strategies tend to reproduce andimpose the naturalistic distinction between wild and domesti-cated animal life in tropical Australia and maintain a strict sep-aration between humans and non-humans.

For indigenous communities, who often have flying foxcolonies in or near their settlements, totems overlap the dichot-omy between wild and domestic. Individuals can have very

strong connections and sometimes close communications withtheir totemic animal species, even if they are considered wildor even dangerous. Flying foxes are highly regarded amongstAboriginal people. There are several totemic sites associatedwith flying foxes in and around Yalanji country, and most ofthem are classified as restricted sacred areas. In the Australiantotemic system, the elements inside the totemic geographicalnetwork are considered familiar and domestic entities. By con-trast, what is outside this network, and does not have a totemicname, belongs to the virtual domain of the unknown. In thiscontext, the flying fox, as a well-established totem, is closerto the domestic domain, while horses, as an introduced species,is closer to wilderness. The longstanding alimentary and medic-inal use of the host species of Hendra virus tends to question therole of flying foxes as the origin of the zoonosis and to rethinkcross-species transmission. From the perspective of long-termco-evolution in a network of kinship, the introduction of foreigndomesticated animals (horses) to Australia has triggered a newhuman disease, born from the forced contact between domesti-cated and wild species. The wild, here, is not the reservoir spe-cies but the invasive species.

Mongolia

In late summer and early fall, Mongolian herders occasion-ally exit the camp to hunt wild animals far from the pastures.They hunt to eat their flesh and use their fur and leather. How-ever, they sometimes hunt to protect their herds from predators(wolves) or from infected wild animals (wolves, foxes, andmarmots, infected with rabies or the plague), i.e. when symp-toms are detected and animals become ill or die. Although theyare not in close or daily contact with wild animals, domesticanimals have occasional contact with them: for reasons of pre-dation and migration, some wild species move more often andfarther than domestic animals whose extensive herding is partlybased on the principle of human nomadization. Also, veryrecently, the Mongolian government has ordered hunters andthe military to shoot herds of gazelles, wild animals believedto be responsible for the emergence and spread of the FMDvirus [48, 49]. Mongolian herders admit different degrees ofdomestication within their livestock, notably regarding horses,a half-domestic half-wild species. Horses are ambivalent meansof transportation, used by monks to send away the soul of adeceased in funerary contexts. Wild animals with fur or feathersallow wandering souls of the dead to approach the living androam around their homes [50].

Uncertainties concerning the wild reservoir of animal dis-eases have caused problems at the government level. Afterthe FMD outbreak of 2010, the lack of a livestock vaccinationprogram led the government to shoot thousands of wild white-tailed gazelles (Procapra gutturosa), voluntarily and wronglyaccused of being the pathogen reservoir [4, 10, 42]. The goalwas to stop the re-emergence of FMD on the border betweenMongolia, Russia, and Inner Mongolia, a territory under theauthority of China. Another objective was to reply to the Chi-nese government who accused nomadic herding in order toencourage sedentary lifestyle in Mongolia. This governmentaldecision to shoot gazelles produced tensions between someconservationists who consider gazelles a protected species –

in accordance with the government decree –, herders who

6 F. Keck et al.: Parasite 2021, 28, 35

legally but seasonally and restrictively hunt them, and poacherswho hunt them illegally and without restraint.

The herders pointed out a contradiction in the government’sstrategy: it claims that the virus “doesn’t cross natural barriers(mountains, desert)” and “can’t spread from eastern to westernprovinces, reach the capital and put the whole country underquarantine”, and at the same time it recognizes that the virus“can cross state borders and create a pandemic”. In 2010,when the government decided to cull thousands of gazelles toeradicate the FMD outbreak in response to pressure from neigh-boring states (China and Russia), experts and NGOs asked thegovernment to respect the law of wildlife conservation. Herderssaid the Mongolian authorities preferred to lie to the populationrather than confront and refute the Chinese government. Whilethe frontier between humans and animals was strictly respected,particularly during the quarantine period, the separationbetween wild and domestic was more easily questioned by her-ders, because it resonated with other frontiers between politicalterritories (Mongolia and China) and social groups (experts,herders and poachers).

While totemic conceptions in Australia reversed the natural-istic opposition between wild and domestic, practices of animalbreeding in Laos and Mongolia anticipate them through spiri-tual and political distinctions.

c) Sick/dead

Zoonoses are conceived as diseases potentially leading ani-mals and humans to death. However, there is not a biologicalcontinuum from disease to death but a moral situation of troublethat requires precautionary measures. The carcasses of sickanimals must be handled with care to avoid zoonotictransmission.

Australia

In Far North Queensland, flying foxes are harvested andkilled by indigenous people as bush meat, using a stick orsometimes a stone or a rifle. They are never killed for purposesother than alimentary or medicinal, and no difference is madebetween healthy or infected bats, mostly because flying foxesare healthy carriers of HeV and therefore show no signs of sick-ness. However, flying foxes are carefully prepared in order tokill the pathogens, but the carcass is destroyed without any par-ticular precaution after culinary or therapeutic preparation andconsumption. Aboriginal people interviewed were opposed tothe dispersal or culling of flying foxes to prevent potentialHeV outbreaks.

Farmers and horse owners have a different approach todealing with bats, which they do not see as a resource but asa problem, mainly for crops and for the threat they representto horses and people. The high number of viruses they poten-tially carry is often brought up as the main reason to disperseor cull bats. Despite their protected species status, some farmersstill do not hesitate to randomly and illegally shoot flying foxesencountered on their property. An application form issued bythe Department of Environment and Heritage Protection in2006 authorizes and regulates their shooting. The documentindicates that “prior to disposal, dead flying-foxes must be held

for 24 h and be available for inspection by an EHP or conser-vation officer”. In cases of Hendra outbreaks, most horse own-ers are generally in favor of bat culling or massive dispersal,which remain rare. Infected horses themselves are euthanizedto prevent the virus spreading. Importantly, any horse thathas been in contact with an infected horse is put into quarantine.

Today, in most cases, indirect action to push flying foxesaway based on netting, sound, light or smoke, is still officiallypreferred. Dispersing a flying fox colony can, however, bestressful for the bats, especially the young, and often leads toa rise in the viral charge [25]. Destruction of bats’ traditionalenvironments and dispersals are thought to be the main causesof Hendra virus diffusion [43].

Mongolia

In general, domestic animals are slaughtered in the campand eaten in the house, and wild animals are shot and eatenout of the camp or house. Slaughter requires killing the animalwithout bloodshed on the ground, considered ancestor’s soil.The herder incises the animal down its sternum, sticks his righthand into the fat groin and presses the thoracic aorta to cut ani-mal blood circulation and cause rapid death. He then cuts theaorta and lets the blood flow into the rib cage. The slaughtererand the killer are both required not to section any bones nor tocut the animal at the joints of the skeleton. This treatmentallows for the consumption of meat of domestic and some wildanimals (e.g. marmot meat).

When an FMD outbreak occurs, domestic animals are killedand the flesh of infected animals is not consumed, even thoughherders know that eating this infected meat will not makehuman consumers ill – the flesh of diseased animals is not eatenin general. If the disease is not contagious, the carcass is leftbeyond the camp boundaries and scavengers will eat it. Other-wise, the sick domestic animal undergoes another treatment:herders or veterinarians take away the infected animals (outof the camp, in the middle of the steppe, wild area), shoot them(cattle) or slice the throat (goat, sheep) thus letting blood flowonto the soil, push them into a deep hole – a mass grave –, dis-infect carcasses with lime and cover them with soil. Beforeburying, they sometimes destroy them in a large fire. Thismeans that contagious non-dismembered and bloodied car-casses are buried.

There are also differences and similarities between the treat-ment of sick animals and the funerary treatment of humans whodied of old age or disease. Since the Communist period,humans are buried in coffins. Before placing the coffin withthe body in the pit, members of the funerary cortege make liba-tions to purify the pit, the grave and the coffin, i.e. by extensionthe body and the soul of the deceased. In both cases (deceasedhumans considered as polluting and contagious animals), thegovernment makes large pits in anticipation. After the disinfec-tion of the pit and the body, the family purifies the house andpersonal belongings of the deceased in the same way as, inthe context of FMD contamination, herders purify enclosures,tools and remaining animals. They use consecrated incensefumigations and libations of consecrated water and milk mix-ture, in addition to the disinfectant (lemonic acid) providedby the authorities. Finally, before going back home, herders

F. Keck et al.: Parasite 2021, 28, 35 7

must purify internal and external parts of their bodies: theyingest a sugar cube dipped in a consecrated mixture of waterand milk, and they rub their hands and face with a cotton ballsoaked in the same mixture [48, 50].

Laos

The treatment of elephant carcasses differs highly fromAustralian and Mongolian contexts. Informants mentioned thatelephants know when they are going to die, and they let themgo alone into nearby forest areas. Therefore, elephants are notkilled by humans even if they are seriously ill or dying. How-ever, an owner was said to deliberately shoot his elephant, notbecause it was ill or sick, but because it was too dangerous forhumans. More generally, when an elephant dies, the owner callsthe ritual specialist who, by a new ceremony, literally separatesthe animal from the household and organizes the funeral in thesame way as for humans. During this ritual, he addresses theelephant’s vital force (kwaan) and all the spirits to inform themthat they are no longer part of the household, meaning that theanimal no longer belongs to the elephant owner’s family. Thesame treatment is applied to human funerals before bodies areburied. And only once this separation is made, the owner deci-des if the body of the elephant is burned, buried or even con-sumed. In Laos, eating elephant flesh is considered as taboojust like in South Asia [54]. Nevertheless, some Tai-Lao infor-mants mentioned that they sometimes eat elephant flesh. Theonly elephant body parts they collect after death are the tusks(for male elephants), and hair from the tip of the tail.

The treatment of animal carcasses is thus different from thetreatment of human cadavers in our fieldwork, but this differ-ence was not justified by the opposition between commoditiesand moral beings as in naturalistic societies.

Discussion: the meanings of zoonoses forpolitics of heritage and conservation

Our ethnographic studies thus show that zoonoses engagefundamental aspects of social life. When pathogens cross spe-cies barriers, they challenge numerous binaries constitutive ofthe social order, of which we have chosen to investigate three:interior/exterior, wild/domestic, and sick/dead. We have foundthat people who live with animals often reverse positions ofgovernmental experts and urban populations on these binaryoppositions, because these people represent spirits who movefrom the interior to the exterior and whose mistreatment, partic-ularly in carcasses, causes sickness. This leads them to includein their domesticated spaces these bats, gazelles and elephantswhich governments and experts represent as wild reservoirs.In the different societies we have investigated, zoonotic out-breaks thereby reveal contrasting representations of cross-species pathogens.

At each of our three sites, we often found that conservation-ists hold an intermediary position between people living withanimals and governments following biosecurity measures. Asthe threat of epidemics coming from animals also reveals thethreat of extinction of animal species, and as the protection ofbiodiversity is shown to mitigate the threat of emerging infec-tious diseases [37], local knowledge is increasingly connected

to a politics of heritage, aimed at conserving animals while pro-tecting those who live with them. In this context, social repre-sentations of pathogens integrate indigenous ontologies withinstabilized institutional forms. While zoonotic outbreaks cansometimes lead to opposition between indigenous people andconservation experts, as we have seen in the case of FMD man-agement in Mongolia, they can also open possibilities for col-laborations between them.

The Mongolian government has made opportunistic use ofthis politics of heritage and conservation. It supports the appli-cation of nomadic herding for the status of international her-itage at UNESCO, to strengthen the contribution of herdersin the preservation of biodiversity on the one hand, but alsothe tourism industry in the countryside, on the other. However,in the eyes of NGO’s who support this application, the Mongo-lian government does not sufficiently fund the development ofveterinary care, nor does it provide herders with an effectivevaccination program. If Mongolia obtained the status of interna-tional heritage for nomadic herding, many herders say that thegovernment would need to foster measures to protect the herdfrom the threats of zoonotic outbreaks.

To bypass private veterinarians and the National VeterinaryAgency, herders have developed a collaboration with interna-tional NGOs specialized in animal health and biodiversity con-servation. These NGOs provide free veterinary treatments andmedicines, regularly send veterinarians to tour the camps, andhelp herders to develop a small business (wood, leather, sew-ing, milk, etc.), while coping with climate and public healthcrises. The same NGOs criticize the specialization of some her-ders in cashmere wool production, which gives them moremoney without providing more work. They also insist that thisactivity weighs too heavily on the ecosystem, does not optimizethe regrowth of vegetation, generates overgrazing that causesclimatic disasters (zud) (snowstorms that freeze the soil, tirethe animals that die of hunger and cold) [3], and causes theemergence of animal diseases such as in Siberia [53]. The pro-tection of nomadic knowledge as a heritage thus appears to be away to protect herders from zoonoses.

Politics of heritage can also conflict with politics of conser-vation because they create new opportunities for pathogens tocross species barriers. An example of this tension can be foundin the annual elephant festival, held since 2007 in the Provinceof Sayabouli in Laos. In the country, most of the elephant tour-ist camps are located in the Luang Prabang area, the ancientroyal capital of the country nowadays turned into the mosttouristic place in Laos. In 2015, a caravan of 20 elephants(caravan xang) crossed the northern part of the country for45 days, in order to raise both local and international awarenessto help save the last elephants of Laos. The caravan was orga-nized by the major conservation center of the country. The jour-ney ended in Luang Prabang where it was associated with the20th anniversary celebration of the city as a cultural heritagesite of UNESCO. As part of the official activities of the celebra-tion, an elephant parade including more than 30 pachydermswas organized in the city. While the warning on elephant TBaimed at protecting mahouts from their elephants, the risks ofa TB outbreak in elephants was perceived by conservationistsand tourist camps as a risk of business collapse; hence, littleinformation was communicated to the general public about

8 F. Keck et al.: Parasite 2021, 28, 35

the subject. Moreover, the politics of conservation left littlespace for mahouts and elephant owners, who were folklorizedduring the elephant caravan, the latter wearing ancient costumesdated from ancient royal times to appear in public. There is anopportunity for such knowledge to be integrated into issuesrelated to public health and protection of the environment. Bytranslating risks of TB into more general concerns for threat-ened species, programs for the surveillance of the disease wouldprobably make more sense for the mahouts and owners.Through the different forms of valorisation it generates, the her-itage process should transform knowledge into a pragmatic toolto conserve animal species [28].

To describe these new relations between natural conservation,cultural heritage, and the ontologies of cross-species transmission,we suggest that attention should be given to the way representa-tions are made and circulated. Here we borrow concepts from theanthropology of art, showing how esthetic representations play onpolarities in the transformation of natural beings into culturalcommodities [34].We ask how the transformation of local knowl-edge into expertise by zoonotic outbreaks integrates local actorsin a global network, or inversely excludes them.

The Australian case brings such lessons in the domains ofindigenous art and wildlife conservation. Since the 1970s, tradi-tional owners and indigenous rangers have been involved innational parks management, combining western technologiesand traditional techniques [18]. Many introduced species (wildpigs, cats, cane toads) were targeted and removed while endan-gered native species like tree kangaroos, cassowaries or bats wereprotected. Since 2010, the spectacled flying fox is protectedunder a National Recovery Plan, which aims at maintainingand restoring the flying fox natural habitat in North Queensland.

One of the traditional indigenous methods still used today isto perform the methodical burning of particular areas of land byrangers, under the guidance of community elders and traditionalowners. This technique of controlled burning allows for a nat-ural patchwork of fertile soil, where plants grow back strongerand greener, providing a continual reserve of nutrients for thelocal fauna, even in semi-desert environments. Over the last50 years, the practice was abandoned in some parts of centralAustralia as indigenous people were removed from the territory.During a bat survey in Central Australia in the mid 1990s, ateam of scientists was investigating the presence of a local ghostbat (Macroderma gigas), living in desert caves and deep over-hangs under the guidance of the indigenous owner of the land.Because the practice of burning had been abandoned, bats didnot find enough food sources and became extinct. Their disap-pearance left the local indigenous communities in a state of pro-found grief, knowing that they could not perform theappropriate tasks necessary to maintain their land [7].

In most Australian indigenous cultures, the balance of theecosystem directly depends on human activities, both physicaland spiritual. While indigenous practices such as burning soilsmaintain the cycle of fertility, some types of ritual actions werealso traditionally performed to ensure that the totemic energy ofa place (and associated mythical being) was correctly redirectedtowards the appropriate species, helping the reproduction pro-cess of a specific plant or animal. These rituals have manynames, but they have been described in classical ethnographyas “increase ceremonies” [38]. They include specific songs,

gestures, paintings, and objects to be performed or manipulatedin order to unlock the totemic energy of a place and maintainthe ecological balance.

While these ceremonies are rarely performed in tropical for-est areas today, some of their core elements are still used in thecreation of objects for museums and the art market. Forinstance, in the east of the Cape York area (Aurukun), flyingfox totems were reinterpreted by Arthur Koo’ekka Pambegan,the guardian of the Kalben ceremony, for public showing. Inthis sculpture, the bats took the minimalist form of a dozen20-cm elongated wooden blocks painted with black and redstripes, hanging between two poles [59]. Because the Kalbenstory is partly secret, the production was closely controlledand limited to museums and fine art markets. Only a fractionof the Kalben myth was made available to the public, includinga part on the regenerative capacity of totemic bats which,according to Pambegan, rose from the dead after they werekilled. In the same way that Mongolian herders say thatpathogens can “silently live” or “survive” in the ground and riseseasonally in certain locations, Aboriginal ritual experts have aspecial understanding of health as a system of interdependentagents in specific places.

Conclusion

Animal diseases are new objects for social anthropologybecause they raise the fundamental questions of the discipline.Research on zoonoses is not only applied anthropology, whereknowledge about culture is used to make public health interven-tion acceptable, but it raises new questions of what is culture,knowledge, health and the human. The perception of a zoonoticrisk mixes different views, potentially conflicting, of domesticanimals and of the threats they introduced from a wild reservoir.The distinction between domestic and wild, or body and soul, isblurred and sometimes reversed when seen from the perspec-tives of those who live in daily contact with animals.

In this article, we have considered the concept of speciesbarriers as a new starting point for enquiries about problemsarising in the domestication of animals. Rather than criticizingthe concept of species barrier as a concern for security projectedon our relations to nature, we consider different representationsof species barriers as ways of bringing new data about human–animal relationships. When pathogens cross species barriers,they enroll a whole range of other invisible beings who takepart in the perception of the environment. Asking how thesebeings can become signs of future threats for humans, we havetraced a map of the different boundaries they have to cross.

We have thus shown that social representations help to sta-bilize zoonotic outbreaks, because humans are attentive to signsof disease based on the knowledge of their environments, inways that are sometimes compatible and sometimes contradic-tory with biosecurity interventions. These social representationscan be extended and institutionalized by discourses of naturalconservation, which may enter into conflict or collaborationwith politics of cultural heritage. Because they are reverse pro-cesses (transmissions of pathogens from animals to humans andfrom humans to animals), zoonoses produce complex relationsbetween humans and animals that cannot be categorized by theopposition between natural reservoirs and cultural interventions,

F. Keck et al.: Parasite 2021, 28, 35 9

but should be analyzed in an ontological process of social rep-resentation. What a zoonotic pathogen is and how it should bemanaged properly are troubling questions open to negotiationsbetween groups, in the management of public health, andbetween species, in the process of co-evolution.

Acknowledgements. DIM1HEALTH (Région Île de France) is agrant on infectious diseases, which supported research on infectiousdiseases under the “One Health” prism (https://www.dim1health.com/). It aims to combine research from various institutional playersand to rapidly make the applicable diagnostic, preventive, andtherapeutic improvements (with regard to emerging or re-emergingdiseases and sociology developments).

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Cite this article as: Keck F, Lain�e N, Morvan A & Ruhlmann S. 2021. Social representations of animal diseases: anthropologicalapproaches to pathogens crossing species barriers. Parasite 28, 35.

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